5 Comments

I'm glad to hear your brother is helping you out with this. I was talking out loud listening to HITD, asking why you're using spreadsheets but not their functionality. You're gonna be a freak in those sheets.

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Since your brother is coming over, he can add a standard deviation calculation for each team in excel. In this way, you can better understand if rule changes are effecting play count or if it could just be randomness.

Second you can use the correlation and R squared excel functions to test if other factors are affecting the play count stat. You could use an offensive or defensive SP+ rating versus play count. I suspect offensive or defensive competency or lack their off might factor into the play count. Weather might be another factor to test.

Third, it might be a worthwhile to have a discussion on how to manage outliers. So the single game of just 45 plays for Michigan might alter the whole season average. It might be rational to exclude that data point. Anyway somethings to consider..

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Looks like your bro also showed you spreadsheet filters? (Or at least is using them...) Those are the bomb. Pivot tables, too.

Football is so weird. So many reasons to have fewer or more plays. Underdog get a couple turnovers early and a quick lead? Park the bus and run out the clock. Staring RB gets injured? Crap, we gotta throw more...

Which means the work you are doing is super interesting, just needs more weeks to look at. Ever thought of a qualitative dimension, too? (Like stats that try to correct for garbage time.)

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You could redo the count such there is a subset of plays with point differential greater than 21 points in the second half. This is how you might capture garbage time plays.

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I started building my own sheet to follow along. I'm glad I did. It's hard to just stare at numbers and understand a difference. Graphing them (Scatter X,Y) is going to look a lot more sane for you. One thing that makes me feel insane is trying to keep both sets of data for each team in the same row. It's going to make writing your formulas much easier. Miami and Michigan times are down 10% (22 min) and 13% (28 min) respectively. Their plays are down by almost the same percent. TT time is down by 20 minutes, but they are now averaging 12 less plays each game. That feels like an entire series.

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